


Cutting a Deal

by Meilan_Firaga



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crack, Deal with a Devil, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 22:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20478392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meilan_Firaga/pseuds/Meilan_Firaga
Summary: Eliot promised to keep them safe until his dying day, but that's not easy in their line of work.





	Cutting a Deal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radchaai (rigormorphis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rigormorphis/gifts).

The final straw was a collapsed skyscraper in the downtown district of another major city. If they hadn’t claimed the whole place was down for construction to cover the job it would have been packed with people. Dozens could have died. Maybe even hundreds. Instead, there was only Eliot doing a final round on the third floor when the plastique was detonated. The billionaires were either getting smarter or way more paranoid. Thirty plus floors came down on their hitter’s head in a matter of seconds.

No one should have been able to walk away from that. To be fair, he hadn’t actually _ walked _ away. It had taken Hardison, Parker, and the first responders they took control of using quickly fabricated Homeland Security badges the better part of an hour to dig him out and get him on a stretcher. They’d loaded him into the back of Lucille—claiming that his health care was classified—and sped off. They called everyone they could think of as they drove, but before they even got through to anyone Eliot sat up with a heaving gasp. It turned out to be nothing more than bruises and sprains. Parker curled up with him on the stretcher while Hardison drove. By the time the young genius pulled them into the safehouse garage Parker and Eliot were both sound asleep.

Hardison moved quietly as he gave Eliot a perfunctory once-over. Many months of sharing the same bed had taught him how to move without waking the other man. There had been one too many incidents where startling Eliot into consciousness ended with Hardison bruised on the floor. There was barely anything more than surface injuries on his partner. The scrapes and bruises on his face made it look a lot worse, but for all the swelling and ugly colors he would heal up just fine. Parker might have been willing to overlook it out of relief that he was okay, but Hardison knew that they’d been overlooking a lot lately. Near-miss bullets. Miraculous car accidents. And now a building collapse.

He propped his feet against the bottom of the stretcher and settled in to wait. 

~*~*~*~*~*~

“What the hell, Hardison,” Eliot growled, shifting Parker against his side. He always woke up early, even when he was recovering. After the building collapse he awoke with Parker curled around him like a spider monkey and Hardison watching him from a desk chair. “Since when do you sit around watching people sleep?”

“How are you alive, Eliot?” The hacker’s tone was flat, his gaze steady. 

At Eliot’s side, Parker shifted into wakefulness. “I thought we were happy Eliot’s not dead.” 

“Oh, I’m happy,” Hardison confirmed. “Jumpin’ for joy. But that doesn’t mean it ain’t suspicious as hell.” He nodded toward Eliot. “This isn’t the first time you’ve survived something you never should have been able to walk away from. Now, I want you alive and with us for as long as we can get, but something isn’t right here. And you need to be honest about it.”

Eliot couldn’t look either of them in the eye. His voice was as steady as usual, but his words were quiet. Still, he told them. In calm, measured tones he explained everything. The drive to the secluded location, the words from the book he’d pulled from a contact in New Orleans. The bargain he’d struck. By the time he was finished, Hardison had thrown open Lucille’s back door and was pacing across the floor of the garage shaking his head.

“Uh uh,” he mumbled as he paced. “No way. You did not.”

Parker was staring at Eliot with wide eyes. “Does this mean I could stab you in the heart and it wouldn’t work?”

“No, Parker.”

“I’m not hearing a joke here, Eliot,” Hardison insisted, turning back to face them with wide eyes. “Tell me this is a joke.”

“So, this means souls are real,” Parker mused. “I bet it’s good business.”

Hardison flailed his arms. “How are you calm about this!? He’s just told us that he literally _ sold his soul _.”

“I just don’t see why that means we have to be so worried.”

“That’s because you’re you, Parker,” Eliot told her fondly. “But that’s the kind of mindset on this we need.”

“What you need is Jesus!” Hardison shouted. “Out here making deals with devils like you ain’t never been to church. My nana’d be ashamed of you.”

“We fix deals all the time,” Parker insisted. “This isn’t any different.”

“This is the de-vil. Supernatural being. Big evil. It’s not like we can just waltz into their offices and do what we do.”

Eliot looked a little sheepish. He reached up to scrub a hand over the back of his head. “Well, actually…”

~*~*~*~*~*~

Being a devil was not all it was cracked up to be. The hours sucked, the pay was terrible, and the job itself was a cross between retail and never-ending clerical filing. Satan St. James—and by the nine circles did he hate his first name; might as well have called him Steve for all the popularity of the name Satan in the underworld—had wanted to be an artist, but Mother and Father insisted that he follow in the family footsteps and join the big office world of devilry. So, he’d done as they asked and worked his way up through the ranks. He even had a few instances where he came in top five of the month for deals made.

And then he’d made The Mistake. 

It was just supposed to be a routine deal. So, the guy was one of those muscle-y beat-em-up types. Deals were made with those kinds of people all the time. Actually, half of Satan’s top deals came from burly fighters who didn’t want to lose. It wasn’t like this guy was one of the three kinds of people you never make deals with: fairy tale nuts, politicians, and—the worst kind of people for devils to have to handle—con artists.

In retrospect, he could have researched Eliot Spencer a little better. 

The deal was rock solid. Not a single loophole. Satan had thought he was going to have the man’s soul within a year given the rough lifestyles of most fighters. And then he’d realized his mistake. Or, rather, his supervisor had made him very aware that he’d essentially made the man immortal so long as his two partners were still alive and in need of protection. Those partners, of course, were a terrible mix of accident prone and genuinely thrill-seeking. One of them jumped off buildings. Daily. For fun. 

Then, things started to go wrong around the devilry offices. Paperwork went missing. Appointments got switched around. Summoning circles reversed and dropped the people seeking deals right into the cubicle farm. It destroyed a lot of illusions. Soul collection plummeted as confidentiality was breached and spirits were freed. By the time the reign of terror reached a fever pitch it was revealed that Spencer and his partners were working their own particular brand of magic to free his soul. The hacker figured out how to jack a Macbook into the soul-powered inter-evil network, baffling every tech specialist soul the devils had access to. The tiny blonde stole something like thirty-six demonic reliquaries in the first week alone, throwing the entire Underworld into chaos. When enforcer demons were sent to haul the culprits in by force they limped back with tears in their eyes and tales of holy water provided by a Catholic priest who apparently owed the humans for helping save his church.

Higher-ups were called in. Negotiations for a cease fire took on a brutal, desperate tone that exhausted even the most seasoned devils in the company. And through it all the constant hammering against the company just. Would. Not. Stop. Finally, it was concluded that the only recourse would be to void the deal and release the human’s soul. For the first time in nearly two millennia. 

Satan, of course, was fired.

When he arrived home at his tiny apartment, cardboard box of personal belongings in tow, nothing seemed out of place. He cut a finger with one ragged claw to smear a streak of blood on the door, disabling all the spells that were the Underworld equivalent of a deadbolt. His hellhound met him at the door, all three of its tails wagging happily to see him home so early. He dropped the box in the entryway and shuffled on cloven hooves through the apartment, ducking under the one light fixture that had clearly not been installed with horns in mind. What Satan needed was a hot lava bath and a glass of something strong. He flipped on the kitchen light and came to an abrupt stop.

On the counter sat a basket. It was filled to the brim with brushes, pencils, and paints. A stack of blank canvases were leaning against the backsplash beside it. Propped on the basket’s front was a plain, lined notecard bearing a single word in handwriting he recognized: _ Thanks _.


End file.
